Violence rages on in Middle East

Gaza City: Covered in blood and dust and wrapped carefully in white cloth, the bodies of four young children lie next to each other, two to a drawer, in the morgue of Gaza's largest hospital.

Two kilometres away in a tree-lined street in the city's centre, bulldozers dig through rubble trying to find their older sister, her body hidden beneath the family's two-storey house that collapsed when it was hit in an Israeli air strike.

The Israel Defence Forces confirmed they had targeted the house of a suspected Hamas man, Mohamed Dallu. His four children died - Sara, 7, Jamal, 6, Yusef, 4, and Ibrahim, 2.

An unconfirmed list from the blog Palestine From My Eyes contained the names of 11 people who died in the attack including Mr Dallu and four children, although the names and ages of the children differed from earlier reports.

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Mr Dallu's father, Jamal, said Mohamed was not a Hamas member but worked as a traffic policeman for the Hamas authority that administered Palestinian life in Gaza.

The BBC later reported that Mr Dallu died in the explosion. Yet more than 18 hours after the air strike, the IDF refused to respond to rumours that it had accidentally hit the Dallu house.

A spokesman would not comment on the air strike or the high number of civilian casualties, except to say the IDF was ''looking into the reports''.

At the Jabalya Camp in Gaza's north, another family was also in mourning.

With the air strikes intensifying, Salam Ibrahim had gathered his wife and two young children close to him on Saturday night, all of them sleeping in the same bed in their house in a tiny residential street. The children, three-year-old Tamir and his two-year-old sister Junah, were killed as they lay next to their parents. The wall of their house collapsed onto the bed after an early morning F-16 air strike.

Israel claims it is carrying out ''surgical strikes'' in Gaza and is making every effort to avoid civilian casualties. As of Monday night, the toll for six days of fire was 90 Palestinians and three Israelis.

''We operate slowly, identify the target and clean the area around it,'' Israel's Minister for Strategic Affairs, Moshe Yaalon, told a news conference in Jerusalem, referring to warnings issued via dropped leaflets and text messages to civilians to stay away from individuals and locations likely to be targeted.

The IDF said militants in Gaza had fired 55 missiles into Israel, of which 36 were intercepted by its Iron Dome missile defence system, including one rocket fired towards its commercial capital, Tel Aviv.

It said it had killed a senior Hamas operative who was responsible for the movement's rocket operations in one of those strikes. An army spokesman identified the Palestinian as Yahya Bia, who was killed in one of the northern neighbourhoods of Gaza City that experienced the brunt of Israeli attacks on Sunday.

There were also grim scenes at the al-Shawa building in Gaza City after an Israeli rocket attack targeted the media centre, home to al-Quds television, which is associated with Islamic Jihad, and other news groups.

One cameraman, 20-year-old trainee Khader al-Zahhar, had his leg amputated as a result of injuries sustained in the attack, while another, Mohamed Musa al-Akras, sustained serious shrapnel injuries.

In the latest incident on Monday, a missile hit a motorcycle east of Khan Yunis in southern Gaza, killing two men and critically wounding a child who was with them, a statement by Gaza's ambulance service said. The two were named as Abdullah Abu Khater, 30, and Mahmud Abu Khater, 32, but the relationship between them was not immediately clear.

An earlier strike on Qarara in the same area killed two farmers - Ibrahim al-Astal and Obama al-Astal, medics said.

In a strike on southern Gaza City, a car was hit, killing one man and injuring another three, officials said, naming the dead man as 23-year-old Mohammed Shamalah.

Shortly before that, three people were killed in a strike on a car in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, all of them from the same family: Amir Bashir, Tamal Bashir and Salah Bashir.

Early on Monday morning, two women and a child were among four killed in a strike on Gaza City's eastern Zeitun neighbourhood. They were Nisma Abu Zorr, 23, Mohammed Abu Zorr, 5, Saha Abu Zorr, 20 and Ahid al-Qatati, 35.

Medics said another man had been found dead in the northern town of Beit Lahiya, naming him as Abdel Rahman al-Atar, a 50-year-old farmer.

In Israel, five victims of a rocket attack in Ofakim were taken to Beersheva hospital - three were moderately wounded and two lightly wounded.

The ferocity of Israel's air strikes and the mounting civilian casualties in Gaza, along with another long-range missile fired towards Tel Aviv, have put added pressure on already difficult talks in Cairo aimed at mediating a truce between Hamas and Israel.

One senior Hamas spokesman, Salama Maaroof, said there was slim hope a truce could be reached when Israeli air strikes took so many lives.

For any deal to be acceptable it would have to include more than just an end to the air strikes - Israel would need to agree to lift its five-year blockade of the Gaza Strip, he said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not indicate a truce was imminent in his statement to the cabinet on Sunday. ''By now the IDF has attacked over 1000 terrorist targets in the Gaza Strip and it is continuing its operations as we speak,'' Mr Netanyahu said.